garded Cromwell,
the man of God, with much less favour than Charles II., the man of
sin; and statesmen who try to rule on exclusively moral principles are
seldom successful and seldom beloved. Henry's successor, Protector
Somerset, made a fine effort to introduce some elements of humanity
into the spirit of government; but he perished on the scaffold, while
his colleagues denounced his gentleness and love of liberty, and
declared that his repeal of Henry's savage treason-laws was the worst
deed done in their generation.[1171]

[Footnote 1171: Sir John Mason, quoted in Froude,
iv., 306 n.]

The King avoided the error of the Protector; he was neither behind nor
before the average man of the time; he appealed to the mob, and the
mob applauded. _Salus populi_, he said in effect, _suprema lex_, and
the people agreed; for that is a principle which suits demagogues no
less than despots, though they rarely possess Henry's skill in working
it out. Henry, it is true, modified the maxim slightly by substituting
prince for people, and by practising, before it was preached, Louis
XIV.'s doctrine that _L'Etat, c'est moi_. But the assumption that the
welfare of the people was bound up with that of their King was no idle
pretence; it was based on solid facts, the force of which the people
themselves admitted. They endorsed the tyrant's plea of necessity. The
pressure of foreign rivalries, and the fear of domestic disruption,
convinced Englishmen of the need for despotic rule, and no consideration
whatever was allowed to interfere with the stability of government;
individual rights and even the laws themselves must be overridden, if
they conflicted with the interests of the State. Torture was illegal
in England, and men were proud of the fact, yet, in cases of (p. 433)
treason, when the national security was thought to be involved, torture
was freely used, and it was used by the very men who boasted of
England's immunity. They were conscious of no inconsistency; the
common law was very well as a general rule, but the highest law of all
was the welfare of the State.

This was the real tyranny of Tudor times; men were dominated by the
idea that the State was the be-all and end-all of human existence. In
its early days the State is a child; it has no will and no ideas of
its own, and its first utterances are merely imitation and repetition.
But by Henry VIII.'s reign the State in England had g